Soda, pop or Coke? Words Northwest natives use

We heard recently that Northwest natives are pop drinkers. Not that we drink more soft drinks than other parts of the nation — we just call them “pops,” according to an informal linguistic study online.

According to that study, the folks in California say “soda,” and people down south tend to order up a “Coke,” regardless or whether they’re talking about a Coca-Cola product.

Now another study out of Ohio State University used Twitter to shake up some of those assumptions about regional terms like.

Recent grad Brice Russ used Twitter to map what terms people use across the country. Sticking with the soft-drink analysis, Russ found out that Northwest tweeters are saying “soda” a lot more than you might have expected — as is the rest of the nation.

Sure, there are still plenty of “pop” drinkers too — but not quite as many as you might think.

Take a look this Google map from the study, showing mentions of “pop” in yellow, “Coke” in red and “soda” in blue. The map shoes 2,952 tweets from 1,118 locations.

via Brice Russ

Russ also analyzed other regional terms, such as “hella.” As in, “That’s hella awesome, bro.” (You have to end a “hella” sentence with “bro” — everyone knows that.”)

Here’s what Russ found, with yellow dots representing “very” and red dots for tweets that used the term “hella” instead.

via Brice Russ

Huh. Must be a California thing.

So, why should we care? The New York Times had this to say about the study:

Twitter, whose users skew younger, more urban and less white than Internet users in general, does provide some methodological challenges to researchers, Mr. Russ acknowledged. (Among other things, he noted, it only shows where users are now, not where they are from originally.) But it may allow them to track linguistic patterns on a vast scale and in something close to real time, identifying phenomena that can then be investigated more deeply by traditional fieldwork.